82 in years. The renversé can make you feel as if the world had briefly spun off its axis.) Or like the highest and most jubilant of all the lifts: the central ballerina is high in the air and fully extended in écarté when suddenly the piano adds its acclaim. That American Ballet Theatre now dances this ballet is in several ways remarkable. In his lifetime, Ashton allowed no foreign company to dance it. Perhaps as a result, at Covent Garden it became enveloped by the same Holy Grail aura that has blighted many . , f " L S 1 h . d " companIes accounts 0 es y pIes and "Apollo"; and during the last ten years of his life it died (died stand- ing up). Since his death, the Royal has not revived it. But, to much Brit- ish surprise, Michael Somes-long the chief régisseur of the Ashton rep- ertory-has staged it for a European and now an American company. A.B.T.'s performances, light and free, are the best "Symphonics" has seen in fifteen years. As was to be expected, it does not read perfectly in the vast, hangarlike space of the Met-no ballet does-but it is an ideal work for teach- ing A.B.T. dancers how to make a dance breathe into the house and how to shape a serene dance phrase to the music. It teaches much else, too: to keep the waist pliant and the base of the neck Praxitelean. And it asks for line, line, line. Academic steps and positions find their perfect resolution in the address of the eyes, the angle of the head, the gentle opening of the hands. The A.B.T. version lacks some- thing in sculptural detail, focus, and ( Ashton's word for this ballet's es- sence) breath. There are, however, numerous gains. The ease of the women in pirouettes frees the ballet from an element of strain it often had at Covent Garden, and the combination of upper- body fullness and precise unison in the two side women (in the first cast, especially) lightens the whole work. In the central role, Christine Dunham has the greater poise and more expres- sive head positions, but in phrasing and plastique I prefer Cynthia Harvey. "Symphonics" is no longer exclusively a British ballet. The warm glade-like green of Sophie Fedorovitch's back- drop is now as much New England as it used to be Arcadia or Ashton's Suffolk. Too bad A.B.T. scheduled only four performances at the Met, and, worse, put them in a block at the season's start. If you were out of town from April 20th to the 22nd, you missed "Symphonics." In the mid-sixties, Ashton made " M " h . f d . onotones, t e paIr 0 pas e troIs to Satie music that have long been . . 1 " M " Internationa currency. onotones is Ashton's ultimate distillation of his personal classicism. It takes the old British mastery of flowing adagio to its purest form. And it refers to "Sym- h . " " A 11 " " L B d .. " P onICS, to po 0, to a aya ere, and to Greek imagery. It does not, however, efface "Symphonics," which is, in some ways, its opposite. All Ashton's plotless works are, in a broad sense, ballets d' action; each one carries a specific sense of time, place, and character. Both parts of "Monotones" are encompassed by darkness; one thinks of the Stygian gloom in which the "Bayadère" Shades scene begins, and of the surface of the moon. "Sym- phonics" is danced in sunlight. Though Sophie Fedorovitch's décor, with its grand parabolas running across the green backdrop, is the most abstract that Ashton ever employed, the chore- ography always makes you feel that these dancers are people in a pastoral landscape. And whereas "Monotones" is daringly sustained in a single slow tempo, "Symphonics" is bright with internal contrast. Its movement is al- most all in various kinds of allegro moderato, and is repeatedly set against the motionlessness of one or more dancers. Sometimes it is the dancers at the center who scarcely move or are still, and the dancing passes around them. At such points, you sense the pattern of suns, planets, and moons-what A. V. Coton, reviewing the original production, called "an imagery of in- finities." One of the features-first seen in that opening female trio-that . d f " F Q " most remin me 0 our uartets is the way the dancers look ahead, then behind. Late in the ballet, the women- MAY 25, 1992 backs to us-cross the stage and, Just as they step into pique arabesque, look- ing forward, they turn to look back; then the men, jumping in second, do the same. This alternation is at its most heart-catching in the brief pas de deux. The leading man carries the ballerina in a soft circuit of floating lifts around the stage ("the enchainment of past and future"); in one she is looking ahead, in the next behind. There is no suggestion of regret. Sim- ply, you sense contemplation even in the midst of action. I owe this ballet much. Eighteen years ago, it formed the centerpiece of the first program of ballet I ever saw at Covent Garden; and it was this and "The Sleeping Beauty," as they were performed there in the seventies, that first addicted me to ballet's radiant legibility. Sitting far away, I would feel how extraordinarily those dances filled the theatre, beaming forth with affecting kinesthetic impact. Had my early dance going occurred in this city, I would surely have learned a similar lesson from Balanchine. On my first evening in New York, in 1979, I watched "The Four Temperaments" from standing room at the back of the New York State Theatre's fourth ring, and felt, more forcefully than anything I had ever encountered in dance, the vast projection of power zooming out through space like an electric charge. Interestingly, "Sym- phonics" and "The Four Tempera- ments" were both made in 1946. Radi- cally different, they have both enlarged the world of ballet. "Theme and Variations" came at the end of seven years in which Balan- chine was choreographing with aston- ishing assurance-astonishing even if you know his earlier masterpieces, "Apollo" and "Serenade." A number of his forties ballets-from "Ballet Imperial" and "Concerto Barocco" to "Symphony in C" and "Theme and V ariations" -set before you classicism as an entire city-state. It has palaces, avenues, parks, arbors, halls, and are- nas. Private and public lives are seen in moving alternation, chivalry is in flower, time past is alive in time present, and pennants wave proud in the breeze. (In 1948, he was at last able to give the city-state a permanent identity, and name it N ew York City Ballet.) Ashton dancers address space and dance through it; Balanchine dancers command space and illumine it. For Ashton, the acad-